While the fertility of the Connecticut Valley was doubtless attractive, some of the motives which actuated Hooker and his followers lie concealed in the naive phrase, "the strong bent of their spirits." Thomas Hooker, and to a less extent John Haynes and Roger Ludlow, were men of outstanding ability. But as their towns were second to Boston, they themselves were overtopped in influence by Winthrop and Cotton, Dudley and Wilson. In the compact community of Massachusetts Bay, ideas as well as cattle found accommodation difficult. In religion and politics Hooker was more radical than Winthrop: he was not wholly out of sympathy with Anne Hutchinson; and he defended the proposition that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people," whereas Winthrop maintained that the best part of the people "is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser." And so, when the petitioners were permitted to leave, the strong bent of their spirits directed them, not only to the Connecticut, but southward without the limits of the Massachusetts jurisdiction. While Hooker and his associates, with room for their cattle and their ideas, clear of Boston's shadow and the din of disputes over the negative voice and the covenant of works, were establishing a more liberal Bible Commonwealth on the Connecticut, Theophilus Eaton, a merchant of "fair estate and great esteem for religion," and John Davenport, a dispossessed London minister, were establishing at New Haven a Bible Commonwealth stricter even than that of Massachusetts. They had arrived, with their congregation of well-to-do middle-class Londoners, at Boston in 1637, where they remained during the winter. Winthrop would have retained them permanently; but Davenport found the colony distracted by the Hutchinson episode, and was as much distressed by the concessions which had been made to the "mere democracy" as Hooker had been by the restraints in favor of a "mixed aristocracy." They therefore moved on, accompanied and followed by some inhabitants of Massachusetts, to establish at New Haven a community in which the Scriptures should be the "only rule attended to in ordering the affairs of government." But these "Brahmins of New England Puritanism" did not find the peace which they pursued. The distractions which they left Boston to avoid attended them in the wilderness; and in the end the colony was united with the settlements to the north, where the liberal ideas of Hooker had proved compatible, not only with strict morality and frugal prosperity, but with religious and spiritual concord as well. The charter of 1662 which founded the larger Connecticut embodied the ideas of Hooker rather than those of Davenport, and was so wisely contrived that it stood the shock of the Revolution and survived to the nineteenth century as the fundamental law of Connecticut.